


beauty came like the setting sun

by procellous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Cosmic Horrors, Eldritch Abominations, excessive use of metaphor, this is so self indulgent i'm not sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 10:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9318569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procellous/pseuds/procellous
Summary: The Paladins of Voltron are human-shaped, but you cannot look on them long.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Magpied_Spider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magpied_Spider/gifts).



> listen. listen cosmic horrors are my jam i love them
> 
> this is so niche i'm sorry

They have too many eyes, spilling out across their skin—  
  
It’s not a physical thing, really, except it is. Hyperreal, in the way things are in revelation, a flare that springs up in a burst of light and leaves afterimages burned into the retina and darkness falling fast again.  
  
Keith’s blood burns, the same stench of gasoline when you cut him, if you can _cut_ a being more flame than flesh—touching him is like touching a candle; wax drips from his jaws, molten glass tears and his eyes are brighthot coals. He has wings, great wings of flame; they span out across the world like a solar flare. Trying to touch him (and how can you not; like a moth to a flame, and you are the moth, consumed for a moment of warmth) is like touching a star, leaving burning fingerprints in the dust. His hair is tendrils of smoke, wisps around his shoulders and ears. He leaves bootprints of cooling lava, streaks of magma beneath his skin, the scent of burning metal and a just-fired gun and spent fuel trailing behind him, flames flickering on his tongue and around his knife-edge teeth, blackening them with soot—  
  
Pidge seems small and frail, birdbones and an eggshell skull; skin pale green and easily torn as a leaf, flowers in her hair, but the forest takes back what belongs to it, green and growing beautiful and delicate until you take a step back and realize what’s been swallowed, the woods are lovely dark and deep and so easy to wander in and chase the dappled sunlight until you turn back and find that it is all overgrown, there is no path anymore—cut a part off, and it will grow back, break her skull (eggshell thin and so easily broken in a hand) and unspool her brain and it turns to topsoil and blooms over with oleander. The green wood does not burn, and deep roots are not touched by the frost. She does not stop, this one, so frail and delicate, so hardy and tough. Her eyes are liquid amber, so tempting to touch and be drawn in and trapped, preserved forever—sweet as honey, thick as tar, as inarguable as the blooming leaf—  
  
Hunk’s laugh is a landslide, his grin an chasm, his voice an earthquake; his flesh is stone, his bones metal, his blood bromine and tears mercury. His teeth glint in light, fracturing it out into strange reflections. Desert sands follow behind, erasing every footprint, and his fingers hang from his hands like dripping stalactites. Mountain ranges are his spine, every ridge and furrow marked out on his skin. He does not regrow, as Pidge does, but nothing is lost from him. The tide washes away at the shore as an island rises in the sea. A brutal strike may chip away at him, yet he feels no pain, suffers no injury. Break him and reveal a jagged edge, cut yourself on the geode of his body. Erode him away and find the dust choking in your lungs. When he moves, he moves slow; rarely does he move fast. Yet any movement is followed close by destruction and woe—  
  
Lance is snow and ice; beautiful and tantalizing until you get too close and he smiles like a glacier and the ice cracks beneath your feet and you fall downdown _down_ into the wine-dark water and all you know is cold, flowing and strong and gets into the cracks and expands, splintering even the most firm bedrock. His eyes are dark and deep as the abyss, glinting with impossible secrets and inconceivable size. Scales cover his skin, overlapping and iridescent, and he draws you down, so deep down no light escapes and yet there is light, glimmering, watery and vague and then there are teeth; so many teeth, jagged and sharp, and mouths within mouths—  
  
Shiro has wings made of teeth and it is best not to think about what he looks like—all teeth and claws and twisted warped flesh, what little flesh is left, heaving and gasping like flail chest and two—three arms, one arm scar and bone and agony and arms don’t branch like that; two arms on one elbow, one metal and mechanics and life and death wrapped around into a ring of shards around the wrist and the other wet clay, a twisted mass of flesh, like someone had seen an arm, once, and then tried to form one blindfolded—the idea of an arm more than an actual body part. There are clouds of void, intense nothingness, and it may be a darkness hiding something or it may be a gaping hole of emptiness, there’s something sucking where his heart may have been once (can’t you hear it beating? pulsing and throbbing) that pulls everyone into his wake, orbiting around his star like planets, inescapable and all consuming. There’s—he glows, if you look at him sideways, from the corner of your eye, a halo around him. It gives off no heat, just a coldness—not like Lance’s cold, which is wet and cloying; but nothingness, void, a lack of heat rather than the presence of cold, an utter stillness. He walks past, and a darkness covers the world, dark and cold and despairing, and passes again, and yet you cannot keep yourself from loving it, from following behind it—  
  
It is best not to look to close upon them; let them pass you by. Shudder as they pass, and turn your feet away from them entirely, to not follow in their wake but to resist the pull, as indisputable as gravity.  
  
All their metaphors are destruction, and all their songs drip with blood, and they have forgotten the frailty of little lives with thread-slender necks.


End file.
